TO COLLEGE & BEYOND!
To College and Beyond! Like many other parents out there, we just dropped our child off for another year at college. This is a big year for her... her senior year. And it’s also a big year for our second oldest. . . his senior year of high school. Which means, next year, based on their current plans, we will have two kids leaving the nest at the same time-- one for good, and one for an academic year. Although that still leaves my two youngest at home, I already feel the knot in my stomach. We raised them to be ambitious, responsible citizens who use their gifts and talents to serve the world. We helped them develop their goals and looked forward to watching them take flight. We joked about when they would finally move out and we would have more time for ourselves, a cleaner house, and more money for our own pursuits! But now that the time is approaching, all I want to do is rewind!
On day one, when they put that child in your hands, you start the process of letting go. You teach them to sleep on their own. Let them climb the stairs by themselves. Watch as they climb on the bus to kindergarten and wave good-bye to you. They face the halls of middle school alone. They go off to homecoming dances, school trips, sports events, and proms without you. And then. . . one day, you are dropping them off at college. You so want to hold on every step of the way! I get it! Going from administrator to spectator is hard!
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No other stage of development prepares a child to launch into independent adulthood like the college years. In fact, Erik Erickson, a developmental psychologist, coined this phase of life a “psychosocial moratorium”-- a time when the young adult is able to suspend normal responsibilities and commitments in search of their identity and purpose in the world. It is psychologically healthy and imperative for your child to gain this independence, struggle with their own decisions, separate from you, conflict with your ideas and values, and “find” themselves. In most cases, preventing them from doing so, trying to do it for them, or standing in their way actually does more damage than good.
So when you are imagining your child’s new-found freedom at college and you don’t hear from them for days or weeks at a time, be assured! Without even consciously knowing it, they are doing the mental, psychological, and social work of becoming fully functioning adults with their own identities and purposes! It is time to give them the space they need to grow through what they go through!
In this series, we will take a closer look at just what is happening in the mind and world of our college-aged children as they find their place in the world! Let’s start with the most fundamental first step. . .
